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Category Archives: the grasshopper king

One final note about the book tour — Elliot Bay Book Company, who handled sales at my talk in Seattle, won a special place in my heart forever, because not only did they have lots of copies of How Not To Be Wrong, they also brought along a small stack of The Grasshopper King! And they even sold a couple. Nice to see that little green paperback again.

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As a reader of novels and not much else, I keep a running list of authorial whims. Male writers of the Roth/Updike generation, for example, love the word cunt. Also, where novelists once adorned their prose with offhand French bon mots, Spanish now appears. Here’s another: Novelists can’t resist including a dog barking in the distance. I’ve seen it happen across the spectrum—Jackie Collins, William Faulkner, and Chuck Palahniuk: “There was no more rain, just an eerie stillness, a deathly silence. Somewhere a dog barked mournfully.” (American Star) “She did not answer for a time. The fireflies drifted; somewhere a dog barked, mellow sad, faraway.” (Light in August) “This is such a fine neighborhood. I jump the fence to the next backyard and land on my head in somebody’s rose bush. Somewhere a dog’s barking.” (Choke)

I checked The Grasshopper King, and nope: no barking dogs. There’s a ceramic dog, and one dog who howls (but who appears moments later, and is named) and finally, near the end, a talking dog. Me 1, cliche 0.

In other Slate literary coverage, Dan Kois reviews Ben H. Winter’s novel The Last Policeman, a detective story set in a future where Earth is six months away from certain destruction by asteroid collision. When I was in college I took Spike Lee’s screenwriting course, and my screenplay was roughly on the same theme. It was a meteor heading for the earth, not an asteroid, and the atmosphere was supposed to be roughly that of After Hours or Into the Night. It was called Planet Earth. Lee’s total commentary on the screenplay, written on page 3, was “Some parts I laughed, some parts I didn’t,” and he gave me an A-.

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Since someone asked me today: yes, the Stanley Higgs who appears in my novel was named after the Higgs boson. I thought it would add a very slight tinge of cosmic mystery to the character. Not any more, I guess.

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In fact, she singles out for praise a single sentence. And the sad truth is: I have no memory of having written this sentence. I guess I’d imagined her favorite sentence would be something I, too, would have singled out in my mind. But no.

Anyway, here it is:

My father, a mild man, dedicated to prudent consistency, demurred.

I’ll stand by this sentence. I think the long part (“dedicated to prudent consistency”) is a bit too chunky in the mouth — too many palatal consonants. I like the faintly comic tang you get from delaying the verb to the end — I stole this trick from somewhere, I don’t remember where. (It might have just been the German language in general.)

Anyway, I have a favorite sentence in the book, but I don’t care to reveal it. Instead, here are a couple of my very favorites from other people’s books.

…the library, the dead core of my education, the white, silent kernel of every empty Sunday I had spent trying to ravish the faint charms of economics, my sad and cynical major.

And, in another register, from Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America:

The sun was like a huge fifty-cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then lit with a match and said ‘Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper,’ and put the coin in my hand but never came back.

I had a thing for invented languages as a kid. I took a correspondence course in Esperanto, and when I got tired of that, I started work (as one does) on my own ideal language, which was called Ilenga. Later, when I was at Johns Hopkins, I spent a lot of time in Eisenhower Library looking at their collection of pamphlets, broadsides, and mimeographed polemics — and even the occasional published book — by language creators whose painstaking constructions never rose to the level of fame Esperanto enjoyed. In the end, a lot of this stuff made its way into The Grasshopper King, which in some sense is about the question: “What if a real language worked the way people who invent languages want languages to work, and what would happen to you if you tried to speak that language?”

It turns out Arika Okrent was looking at the same shelf of pamphlets. And she now has a book, In the Land of Invented Languages, a kind of cultural history of the idea of the invented language. You know how when you see the one-paragraph description of a book, and the premise is really great, and you say to yourself “I really hope this book is good, because if it isn’t, it’ll be impossible for any future good book on this premise ever to published?” That’s how I felt. And I’m happy to report that Okrent’s book is everything I wanted it to be. Partly because she’s a good, energetic writer. Partly because she has a Ph.D. in linguistics and writes with an easy authority about the technicalities that vex her subjects. And partly because she’s a hell of a researcher with an eye for the strange, decisive detail. Three great facts I learned from this book:

Grover Cleveland’s wife had a dog named Volapük.

George Soros’s father was born with the surname Schwarz; he was a dedicated Esperantist and changed it to Soros, Esperanto for “will soar.”

James Cooke Brown, the inventor of Loglan, had the time and disposable income to create a language because he also invented the boardgame Careers. Brown, a lifelong socialist, intended Careers to counteract what he saw as Monopoly’s overemphasis on making money as the sole goal of life. I was a major Careers fan as a kid and let me just say this point was utterly lost on me.

This book pulls off a very difficult trick. Okrent is writing about people who are often strange and almost always, in one way or another, misguided. She gives you the full measure of their strangeness, but never deviates from her posture of bemused respect for the audacity and technical difficulty of the tasks they’ve set themselves. Good trick; good book.

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Via Crooked Timber I learned about Wordle, the application that takes any chunk of text and produces a beautiful graphic representation of the most common words therein, sized according to their frequency. So here’s The Grasshopper King:

I especially like the tiny “asked” inside the “d” of “said.” I think that’s just good luck; it would be impressive if Wordle knew enough to make up little figures of this kind.

I wonder if most prose fiction would come out looking pretty much alike, apart from the names of characters? The predominance of “said” must be pretty universal.

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So opines Doug Moe in the Wisconsin State Journal, which has a nice interview with me in tomorrow’s paper. Look closely and you’ll see that Ken Ribet has a photo credit!

In case anyone’s coming here from the WSJ and wants to read some of the things mentioned there: you can buy my book here. You can read my Slate columns here, including my thoughts on Barry Bonds and the placebo effect. The best pizza in Berkeley (or anywhere) is Cheeseboard, and the best ice cream in Cambridge (or anywhere) is Christina’s, as described in The Restaurant Hall of Fame.

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There’s a very generous and keen review of The Grasshopper King this week in Letters From A Broad. When you read a really nice review of a book do you wonder to yourself whether the reviewer is a personal friend of the author? In this case, that’s a yes. And now I will return the favor by reminding you that you can read LFAB’s book Ex-Mormon online, at least in part. I’m all about maximizing the click-through rate, so let me direct you straight to the section called “Sexual Purity.”

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When it started up, Google Books had spotty coverage for literary fiction. But I’m happy to report that they now offer The Grasshopper King – well, not the full text, but all of the first chapter, and enough of the rest to get a sense of the book.

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Marshal Zeringue asked me a few weeks back to contribute to his blog Writers Read, which has a simple but very effective premise: he writes to writers and asks what they’re reading. Here’s my response. Other friends who’ve contributed: Ben Wittes and Steve Burt.